Assassination aftermath gives Clinton chance to tout experience

Sunday

Dec 30, 2007 at 12:01 AMDec 30, 2007 at 9:17 PM

By the time the plane carrying Sen. Hillary Clinton broke through an early-morning fog to land in Lawton, Iowa, on Thursday, she’d already learned of the event a half-world away that could have a big effect on her campaign to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

DeWayne Wickham

By the time the plane carrying Sen. Hillary Clinton broke through an early-morning fog to land in Lawton, Iowa, on Thursday, she’d already learned of the event a half-world away that could have a big effect on her campaign to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

“I am just profoundly saddened and outraged by the assassination” of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Clinton, D-N.Y., told me moments after her plane landed.

“I viewed her as a leader of tremendous political and personal courage.”

The death of Bhutto, killed while campaigning to become her country’s president, Clinton said, “is a terrible reminder of the work that remains to be done to try to bring peace and stability to regions of the globe, like Pakistan, that are too often beset by fear, hatred and violence.”

What she didn’t say is that Bhutto’s killing reinforces a point she has tried to drive home to Democratic voters in Iowa in these final days before the Jan. 3 Iowa Caucus: In a world full of danger, the United States needs a president who can hit the ground running, not one who’ll have a big learning curve.

That’s the message Clinton has tried mightily to get across in what her campaign is calling her “time to pick a president” swing around the state.

And it’s an argument she reinforced in her telephone interview with me.

“The next president will find waiting on the desk in the Oval Office two wars; one to end, one to try to salvage,” she said, referring to the war in Iraq that Democrats want to end and the war on terror that they think should be pursued more aggressively.

“Violence and instability from Africa to Pakistan, a much-emboldened position by Russia and China vis-à-vis the United States, a deteriorating situation in the Persian Gulf region and the Middle East, a turning away from democracy in Latin America,” are all problems the next president will have to confront, Clinton said.

Until now, her efforts to market herself as the most experienced contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination have been mired in a debate over what voters are looking for in the next chief executive. Recent polls have shown them divided between a candidate who represents change and a candidate with significant experience.

Bhutto’s death might change that. Her assassination threatens to plunge Pakistan into a spiral of violence, and possibly civil war, that could have grave consequences for this country. Pakistan is a wobbly Third World nation with a nuclear arsenal.

It’s also believed to be the hiding place of Osama bin Laden and a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.

In the wake of Bhutto’s assassination, Pakistan looms as a far more dangerous place, a nation that could unleash a wave of violence reaching the streets of this country.

Although Clinton didn’t draw a direct link between her argument that voters should embrace her experience and the shock waves Bhutto’s death has produced, she made a subtle connection between the two.

“Voters, starting in Iowa, are going to be picking a president, and this is a time for deliberative analysis about who would be the best president, from day one,” she told me. “And I am doing everything I can to make that case based on my 35 years of work” in various positions of government.

Before Bhutto’s death, that kind of talk sounded like just another debating point in the verbal sparring among Democratic presidential rivals.

Whether voters give it any more weight in the aftermath of Bhutto’s slaying and Pakistan’s threatened implosion we’ll find out soon enough.